Critics Bear it Away

by Frederick Crews

Frederick Crews has been a force in American literary culture ever since his hilarious spoof of criticism, The Pooh Perplex, made its way onto the bestseller lists in 1963. Now, in The Critics Bear It Away, he turns his attention to the way key American novelists - from Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Twain to Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Connor, and Updike - are being apprehended, and misapprehended, by the academic avant-garde. As Crews shows, recent theoretical discourse takes a justifiably hard line toward the liberal humanism and formalism that dominated the discussion of American classics for many years following World War II. As academics have become more distrustful of the social attitudes that produced a largely white-male, New England-based canon, they have developed a dramatically altered account of standard authors - sometimes indicting them for ideological deficiencies, sometimes attempting to render their texts more congenial through "decentered" techniques of analysis. With relentless logic and a keen eye for the telling detail, Crews shows what is gained and, more often, what is sacrificed by such well-intentioned maneuvers. Are we really better off, he asks, with a Mark Twain who has been stripped of his idiosyncratic wit and reduced to the level of contemporaries whose prejudices he may have shared? Conversely, should we rejoice when methodological sleight-of-hand makes Faulkner's blatant sexism and Flannery O'Connor's Catholic pietism disappear? This is not to say, however, that Crews exercises his skepticism only on proposals from academic trendsetters. The Critics Bear It Away is just as unsparing toward traditionalists who want the cultural clock to be forever stopped at 1945. Crews's purpose is not to support a faction but to expose critical illusions. "And the particular illusions I will be examining," he announces, "originate in conservative as well as radical impulses - in, for example, New Critical formalism, orthodox intentionalism, Christ

Genres: Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published August 11, 1992

About the author

Crews was born in suburban Philadelphia in 1933. In high school, Crews was co-captain of the tennis team; and he continues to be an avid skier, hiker, swimmer, motorcyclist, and runner. Crews lives in Berkeley with his wife of 52 years, Elizabeth Crews, a photographer who was born and raised in Berkeley, CA. They have two daughters and four grandchildren.

Crews completed his undergraduate education at Yale University in 1955. Though his degree was in English, Crews entered the Directed Studies program during his first two years at Yale, which Crews described as his greatest experience because the program was taught by a coordinated faculty and required students to distribute their courses among sciences, social sciences, literature, and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in Literature from Princeton University in 1958.

Crews joined the UC Berkeley English Department in 1958 where he taught for 36 years before retiring as its chair in 1994. Crews was an anti-war activist from 1965 to about 1970 and advocated draft resistance as co-chair of Berkeley’s Faculty Peace Committee. Though he shared the widespread assumption during the mid-1960s that psychoanalytic theory was a valid account of human motivation and was one of the first academics to apply that theory systematically to the study of literature, Crews gradually came to regard psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. Crews’ change of heart about psychoanalysis convinced him that his loyalty shouldn’t belong to any theory but rather to empirical standards and the skeptical point of view. Throughout his career, Crews has brought his concern for rational discourse to the study of various issues, from the recovered memory craze, Rorschach tests, and belief in alien abductions, to theosophy, creationism, and “intelligent design,” to common standards of clear and effective writing.


Fulbright Lectureship, Turin, Italy, 1961–62
Essay Prize, National Council on the Arts and Humanities, 1968
Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, 1965–66
Guggenheim Fellowship (Literary criticism), 1970[1]
Distinguished Teaching Award, University of California, Berkeley, 1985
Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1991
Faculty Research Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley, 1991–92
Editorial Board, “Rethinking Theory” series, Northwestern University Press, 1992–present
Nomination for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (The Critics Bear It Away), 1992
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay (The Critics Bear It Away), 1993
Berkeley Citation, 1994
Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002, ed. Natalie Angier (Houghton Mifflin), 2002
Fellow, Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health, 2003–present
Berkeley Fellow, 2005–present
Inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005, ed. Jonathan Weiner (Houghton Mifflin), 2005
Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Award (Follies of the Wise), 2006

Reviews

[Ed Erwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reviews of book reviews! Crews takes a look at some of the ways academics have dissected and interpreted writers such as Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, Faulkner, Hemmingway and Updike, and have sometimes gone off in entirely ridiculous directions. The best part for me is where Crews takes a new looks at what he himself had written in the past and criticizes it. Early in his career, he was a big fan of Freud, but later he realized that Freud is, to put it mildly, not always right.

Pretty dry reading unless you are really into literary criticism. If you are only slightly into it, then his parodies The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh of criticism are much more fun. And if you really want the dirt on Freud, I suspect his Freud: The Making of an Illusion would be of great value.